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While checking inbound links to his Steampunk Workshop, MAKE pal Jake von Slatt stumbled on this amazing steampunk casemod on a Polish modding forum. Really amazing, with needle guages, lots of lighting F/X, a porthole with clockworks inside, and lots of old school plumbing hardware

It seems that Musician's
Friend is having a "moving our warehouse" sale. The old bear can't
resist the shiny stuff, so I snarfed up a pair of CAD GXL3000 PRO multi-pattern mics for $70 each. List is $219, they
say. They arrived today. Sweet!

Gave a listen to the current state of CC&S in the car -- level problems on 5 tracks, plus the two that
still need major work. Getting there.

You've wished upon a star, tried to find the man in the moon, and secretly still want to be an astronaut (remember when you were 8 years old?). Now, for the first time, the heavens are truly within reach, when you charter Virgin Galactic for the journey into space. It may sound like science fiction, but it's very real indeed.

The bad points are: no 24-bit recording in 4-track mode, and although it can function as a USB audio interface, it only does so at 16 bits. Battery life is only 4 hours; on the other hand that's roughly twice what you'll get out of a 2GB SD card at 24 bits. Bring spares.

Went to Fry's after lunch, looking for retractible USB and Firewire cables
(which I found), a compact preferably wireless trackball and a sleeve or
thin case for the new laptop (neither of which I found). To assuage my
sorrow and get in a little more walking, I trundled over to the enticingly
close and ever-dangerous Gryphon
Stringed Instruments.

There in the glass case under their front counter my roving eye lit on a
cute little Meisel MCT-7L clamp-on chromatic tuner. It was only $30, and I'd
been contemplating bringing my travel guitar to Portland next week.

It's pretty impressive. The box it comes in is 5mm shorter than a 5cm
cube. It has a bright-green-backlit LCD display that imitates an analog
meter, syncs quickly and accurately, and is more convenient than my Boss
TU-12 and easier to use (and probably more accurate) than the built-in
tuner on my Ovation. Shiny!

...but they only had one in the store, and it was likely to be gone by the
time we needed it. The fact that I'd been to the bank earlier this
morning and knew what my balance was also contributed to the decision,
along with the fact that our Kitchenaid mixer is still doing just fine
after 25 years or so. Of course the fact that the saleslady knows me and
the flower_cat well, and knows of our fondness for Japanese
sharp pointy things...